If events on the pitch didn't confirm the view that this is one of the poorest teams ever to pull on the Royal blue, then the unkind chants of from the visiting Wearsiders reminded the faithful of the fact that their idols are now very much of the fallen variety.

Even worse, that fall getting steeper by the year could yet plunge the club out of the Premiership if rich-kid incomers like Fulham and Blackburn Rovers slot comfortably into an already crowded mid-table.

This is a worry for Walter Smith, and not simply because one of his closest friends, the fire-breathing Graeme Souness, will be fighting to cut the ground from under the league's swarm of enduring strugglers.

The concerned Scot has already warned the Everton board that if they want him to bring in another stretcherful of cast-offs and casualties, then, like him, they will have to suffer the consequences. Without undue complaint.

Chairman Sir Philip Carter may have nodded those cautionary phrases through, but that didn't prevent him having a moan in Saturday's match programme.

Full of hand-wringing and dead-cat bounce, his intervention read like a begging letter gone horribly wrong.

The first sentence deserved an award all of its own for confusion. Like a daub of rouge on the face of a corpse, it totally failed to disguise the creeping decay beneath the mortician's paint.

"Once again the marathon is all but complete," boomed Philip. "And, sadly, not for the first time in recent years, season's end has brought not the tangible rewards of success, but the simple sense of relief engendered by the preservation of our place among the elite."

For Everton fans that translated as: "We've been utterly lousy and will probably continue to be so because we're stony broke. But if I lob in a few ten-penny words like marathon, tangible, engender, preservation and elite it may be confused with status of a sort, instead of flannel, well-soaped ."

To be fair to Carter, an amiable man, paragraph seven at last revealed the worms which lay beneath the stones.

No attempt at gilding here, as he said: "We must not delude ourselves into believing that the long-anticipated renaissance of our great club is inevitable."

In other words, without the club's missing wallet return to Bill Kenwright, small reward offered poor old Walter will continue to double as Everton boss and motorway medic frantically scrabbling through the wreckage.

Some of that wreckage was to be found strewn over Goodison on Saturday. An early lead, courtesy of an Idan Tal free-kick that flicked off Stefan Schwarz and into the Sunderland net, was followed by 35 minutes of supreme inefficiency that must have made Peter Reid's side imagine they were playing at home.

The best forward on the pitch, Kevin Phillips, duly equalised as the Everton defence disappeared from his vicinity, while steadier finishing from Kevin Kilbane and Niall Quinn might have have made things infintely more horrible.

As it was, Walter's half-time eye-popping worked such a sea-change that Sunderland were never a force again until Phillips' superb equaliser and a frantic head-over from Steve Watson that prevented the England striker claiming a hat-trick from a free-kick adjacent to the Everton goal-line.

In between times the Blues won two penalties, one missed by the normally deadly David Unsworth, the other confidently knocked in by Michael Ball.

The first award represented Black Cat misfortune for the returning Don Hutchison. Replacing Julio Arca, he found himself the last line of defence as Unsworth pounded. Out came the leg, out came Unsworth' s swan-song misfire.

Europe had beckoned for Sunderland. But not too enthusiastically on this showing. Reid has done well at the Stadium of Light, yet his team succeeded only in matching Everton's ordinariness for long spells.

Idan Tal was probably the pick, but even here the quality of the final ball even one sponsored by Johnson Wax often lacked the required polish.

Like Everton, sadly. Lots of effort, but little in the way of elegance or guile. And, if Sir Philip is be believed, not a chance of Walter being able to a damn thing about either.

Anyway, enjoy your summer. In the spirit of these Everton times, it's sponsored by Kleenex.